No fewer than five major announcements in the development field are being issued by Microsoft this afternoon, the timing of which is by no means coincidental: On the top of the list, Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 - which is quickly losing touch with its old code-name 'Orcas' - will be made generally available for download by this Friday, along with Beta 2 of .NET Framework 3.5.

Dude, I was a diehard J2EE webapp developer who thought ASP was kids stuff, and looked down on all those losers who were stuck coding on the platform. Nowadays I am freelance, and all my friends are laughing at me because of how much I rave about ASP.net 2.0. It's not perfect, but its a good generation or two ahead of anything else out there, and it is a pure joy to code in.

The only thing I missed about my java days was IDEa by Jetbrains, which I still think is the greatest thing ever. Recently I found out about resharper, and was only too eager to hand over the two hundred they ask for to bring all the best stuff over into VS.

Honestly, I think that .net is the single best accomplishment ever to come out of microsoft.

You are right about the asp.net 2.0 stuff. The APIs and workflow are really well done.

And you are even more right about the IDE/Code situation. C# is a great language, but editting it in VS2005 feels like stepping back in time about 6 years. Java development environments are much nicer from a pure coding standpoint.

I was shocked at just how primitive editing in VS really is considering how everyone always talks about how it is the best IDE. Once you've added Resharper it's pretty good though.

The initial .net attempt by MS was an obvious copy of Java, but they've done a great job of improving it. 2.0 is a very nice coding environment and they're adding new stuff now at a rate that's hard to keep up with. Very few people have even started using .net3 and pretty soon 3.5 will be ready which is starting to take C# in a different direction than the traditional C type language.